The assumption built into almost every prominent soft power index, whether it is Portland’s Soft Power 30, Brand Finance’s Global Soft Power Index, or the Elcano Global Presence Report, is that influence scales with volume. More broadcasting, more spend, more cultural institutes, more presence means more impact. But the index model reveals an adherence to a previous model of media. The indices are chasing volume of reach and mistaking it for resonance — counting what’s transmitted, not what’s received.
Below the radar of big index promotion, the true practitioners of soft power — more often called cultural or public diplomacy, and the people who actually move the needle — tell a quieter story about how perceptions shift, messages resonate and trust is built. In the careful world of diplomatic engagement, the work that lands is the work that carefully reads the room. In this environment, the same substance, pitched in the wrong register to the wrong audience, achieves nothing, or worse, it achieves the opposite of what was intended. A cultural initiative delivered with genuine fluency, however small, can outperform a campaign ten times its size.
Soft power is not a function of volume. It’s a function of fluency — the capacity to encode a message in the cultural register of the audience.
In the increasingly international character of cultural exchange, let’s call this the global fluency thesis. When the message is shaped with the audience in mind — not the projecting party — spend and broadcast are multipliers of fluency. A culturally fluent small initiative can easily outperform a culturally tone-deaf mega trumpeted set-piece. This matters because most national soft power strategies, and most city or regional branding efforts, are often structured around volume. They invest in reach before they invest in register, building megaphones instead of cultivating resonance through invitation to experience or word of mouth.
Marty Neumeier’s framing of the difference between marketing, advertising, PR and branding offers a useful lens for soft power. Most national strategies still sit somewhere in panels 1–3 — asserting, repeating, or vouching. The fluency thesis is panel 4: the receiver describing the sender, in their own words. The public sector has much to learn here from the private.
Source: The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier. Reproduced under the author’s “steal my idea” principle. Original: martyneumeier.com
Having spent years working across this terrain — for clients as varied as the British Council and the government of Nanjing, advising in Saudi and broader Gulf development on cultural strategy, and even teaching persuasion and brand to American undergraduates at USC, I’m consistently struck by how rarely we focus on trying to understand our audience, and how ‘our story’ leads before understanding what our audience is concerned with and how it might land. Budgets are debated. Channels are debated. Spokespeople are debated as the people or routes that best express our character. But how the reader will interpret our intention is rarely the start point. Whether the message, as constructed, will read to its intended audience as the sender imagines it will is a question rarely considered.
The typology below is a way of making that question visible.